The cost of kids' teeth is a bracing experience

By Monica Dux

20 September 2018 — 12:51pm

Of the many experiences that fall into the "nobody prepared me for this" category, parenting a child with an orthodontic plate poses some particularly unexpected challenges.

First there's the white gunk that builds up on the thing and must be carefully brushed off, usually by me, since my daughter seems incapable of properly cleaning all the foul nooks and crannies. Then there's the fact that she spends more time sucking on her plate than actually wearing it, and the incessant nagging from her mother that accompanies this. And who can forget the time the dog decided her orthodontic looked like a tasty treat, and gobbled it up. Luckily he spat it out again, deciding that white mouth gunk isn't his thing after all. Which means we were luckier than some friends of mine, who had to wait until their child's plate passed through the family mutt before they recovered it.

Illustration: Robin Cowcher

But by far the biggest plate-related danger is the possibility that my daughter will lose the damn thing. We narrowly avoided this catastrophe recently, after dining at a Mexican-style café. As we drove away, pleasantly stuffed with corn chips and guacamole, my daughter suddenly called out in panic "My plate! I left it on the table!"

My husband swung the car around like a stunt driver and screeched to a halt outside the cafe, while I ran in and pleaded with the waitress that I be allowed to search through their rubbish. It was like rummaging through a giant, deconstructed burrito gone slightly rancid. Still, I eventually emerged victorious, with my daughter's plate daintily wrapped in a serviette.

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It's not simply the inconvenience of replacing her plate that drives such desperate behaviour. The reason people are willing to rummage through garbage, and even dog droppings, is that orthodontics cost a small fortune.

When I was in school there were a handful of kids who had braces, but they were very much in the minority. By contrast, my children's primary school is bristling with corrective dental devices, a function of the fact that my kids are surrounded by similarly privileged youngsters, whose parents can afford to pay for straight teeth.

Notoriously, many working class women used to have all their teeth removed when they married, in order to avoid becoming a financial burden to their husbands, should they later require expensive dental care. Such practices horrify us now, yet teeth remain a clear indicator of class, even in modern "classless" Australia.

Recently, health expert Dr Lesley Russell revived the question of why dental work isn't covered by Medicare. As she argued in her article, medicine and dentistry "have never been treated the same way by the healthcare system, health insurance funds, policymakers and the public." As a result of this distinction, the various public dental health schemes that exist in Australia are far from adequate, resulting in a profoundly unequal system, where dental work is often treated as a luxury rather than a necessity. In Tasmania, for example, the average wait for the public dental service is 916 days. That's nearly three years of a child's life.

What's particularly scandalous about this is that we now know that oral health is crucial to our overall wellbeing. Which is hardly surprising, given that your teeth and mouth are part of your body, not some isolated add-on.

Imagine if we treated other parts of our anatomy with a similarly exclusionary policy. If public health schemes arbitrarily excluded illnesses of the pancreas, or lungs, leaving people with such conditions to fend for themselves. There'd be an outcry. Yet we're meant to blithely accept this state of affairs when it comes to accessing dental care.

My daughter will no doubt grow up with healthy teeth, and so will avoid a host of complications that she might otherwise have faced later in life. Conversely, a child whose parents couldn't afford proper dental care will likely end up facing a range of entirely preventable problems. And the awful part is, they'll probably be blamed for it. People will ask, how could they have let their teeth go like that? Why didn't they take better care of themselves? Because it's easier to blame the individual than reform a broken system.

Archaeologists often look at the state of our ancestors' teeth in order to guess what their diet might have been, and to gauge their probable affluence. It's a sad indictment of our society that future archaeologists will be able to draw the same distinctions from our remains, with the haves neatly divided from the have-nots by rows of straight, healthy teeth.